The Government
is moving ahead with plans to establish a centralised national register
of voters, together with central checking and verification of the data held
on electoral registers. The system, to be implemented in the form of CORE
(Co-ordinated Online Record of Elector) schemes, is intended to be brought
in via the Electoral Administration Bill currently before Parliament, and
is subject to a consultation process ending on 7th March.

According to the consultation document (available here),
the CORE system is intended to improve the quality of electoral registers,
provide more efficient access to registration data, support "modernisation
of the voting process" and provide opportunities for reports and research
to be produced based on a national dataset. Essentially, standardised electronic
systems will be introduced in the UK's voting systems in preparation for
the implementation of electronic voting in its various flavours, and the
Government has opted for a sort of compromise between maintaining the current
decentralised election systems and imposing a national, centrally-controlled
one.

But only sort of. CORE systems will work via a "CORE
keeper", probably an experienced Electoral Registration Officer in
the system's initial, regional rollout, but likely to be the Electoral Commissioner
once the system is live nationwide. So the Government is giving itself powers
to set up CORE schemes, but ultimately only a single national scheme is
envisaged. The CORE keeper(s) will perform some of the functions EROs are
expected to perform under the current system, i.e. check for multiple registration
of electors, for a single elector being issued with and/or casting more
ballots than they are entitled to, or for suspiciously large numbers of
electors being registered at a single address.

Local EROs will provide the CORE keeper with the electoral
registration data (possibly as frequently as daily), while the CORE keeper
will use the national dataset to spot anomalies and potential frauds, and
will then forward details to all the EROs affected. Clearly an element of
clunkiness intrudes here, because in principle most of the problems identified
by the CORE keeper would - given sufficient resources and motivation - have
been tackled directly by local EROs under the previous system. One should
therefore expect that the advantages attached to the introduction of a national
system should be sufficient to outweigh the disadvantages of inserting an
extra tier into the process.

So, what are the problems that the new system is intended
to solve? Historically, although the UK has had numbers of (relatively mildly)
rotten boroughs, the incidence of fraud has been fairly low, and the checks
and balances of the old-style system of paper ballots were sufficient to
keep it low. The Government's massive extension of the postal ballot system
in recent years however effectively short-circuited many of these checks
and produced opportunities for industrial-scale ballot-rigging. This has
proved difficult for EROs and the police to control, and abuses of the system
in recent elections have forced the Government to put the brakes on plans
for electronic voting, whether by Internet, cable TV or text message.

A centralised system with access to all electoral registers
has the advantage of being able to identify people voting in more than one
area, but this is a fairly unusual occurrence, to the extent that it's surely
barely worth bothering about. It is not however by any means obvious how
the proposed system would deal with the kinds of abuses of the postal ballot
system we've recently witnessed. Large numbers of postal ballot papers in
the names of genuine voters can be, and have been, diverted into the hands
of crooked campaigners, while the opportunities to blur the boundaries between
sharp practice and full-on ballot-rigging have increased massively. It is
fraud to extract large numbers of blanks from the postman and fill them
in yourself, but it is not (exactly, perhaps) fraud to 'help' people fill
in their form, collect them all together and take them down to the count
in a big pile. The several hundred ballot papers in the same handwriting
ought to be spotted at the count (so CORE keeper not needed here), but neither
EROs nor the proposed CORE keeper system have any simple and obvious ways
to spot where 'helping' and/or block voting becomes fraud.

The problems produced by large-scale postal balloting
are in many cases similar to those which would be produced by electronic
voting, but it's pretty clear that the latter will tend to magnify them,
in the sense that you don't need to disguise your handwriting in order to
forge an electronic ballot. So we certainly have a verification problem
to overcome if we're to introduce electronic voting; better verification
might also, in principle, do something to stop the rot setting in via postal
voting, and might be some help in old style conventional balloting, should
we decide not to abolish it entirely (I say 'might' because the old system,
although wackily using verification systems without a requirement to present
ID, pretty much worked anyway).

The plans for a single national CORE keeper would effectively
institute an embryonic national voter verification system, and therefore
it's no great surprise that verification figures in the "Future possibilities"
section of the consultation paper. Nor, indeed, that the approach taken
to databases seems awfully familiar: "Accurate and effective data-matching
across different datasets requires some form of personal identifier [quelle
surprise...) held in common. An immediate obstacle is that no such common
personal identifier currently exists within electoral registers, other than
the name itself. This is of very little use unless combined with other -
more unique - personal identifiers."

So... "With a CORE consolidated dataset, it should
be possible to check elector records against a dataset requiring much higher
levels of verification. The other dataset might also make notification of
changes to personal details or addresses a requirement [heard this one before?]
and discrepancies could be referred back to an ERO for investigation."
So, if you have (for example) a national ID card register that requires
people to notify changes in personal details and address, when you find
discrepancies you can always get the local Electoral Registration Officer
to do the legwork of chasing them up for you. Brilliant. "Verification
services were considered in detail in the ID card register proposals. The
anticipated high level of security checking and intended requirements for
citizens to notify changes may make the ID card register dataset a particularly
useful comparator." And as collateral damage, those of us refusing
ID cards may also find ourselves being unable to vote...

UK electoral registers consist of name and address,
while presence on the register indicates eligibility to vote and (at least
in theory) a desire to be registered to do so. The anticipated National
ID Register will include name and address, eligibility to vote (i.e. age,
nationality), so the only thing the electoral register has that the NIR
hasn't got is that the electoral register is 'opt-in', and if you don't
want anything to do with it, then you needn't have to. One could therefore
ask if the preservation of this small freedom justifies the continuing existence
of lists that, come the NIR, will be otherwise redundant. Strangely enough,
the Government appears not to think much of this freedom anyway ("There
may indeed be an argument for a local ERO to automatically register the
individual", it says here), and some Ministers have also argued for
the abolition of the related refusenikism of declining to vote, by making
it compulsory.

Along with the ID card tie-in we have the usual collection
of 'advantages' of linking Government databases: "One simple way in
which links with other databases would bring value for the electoral register
is the familiar concept of the 'one stop shop' for the citizen [ever wonder
how many of these shops and stops the Government proposes to build?]. When
the citizen updated their personal or address details with another public
sector database (e.g. the Inland Revenue or the Benefits Agency), that change
of relevant elector status could be automatically notified to CORE for onward
transmission to the relevant ERO." Also proposed are links to the national
register of births, deaths and marriages (and, should the project every
fly, through life records) while gaps in the electoral register (e.g. areas,
geographical, demographic or both, where large numbers are not registered)
can be identified by "linking CORE to other datasets at a national
level."

Here, the consultation document points to "a new
duty on EROs to maintain their registers with the aim of getting onto the
register as many eligible voters as possible". this to be introduced
via the Electoral Administration Bill. This, you will note, changes the
role of ERO from administrator of the electoral system to one of salesperson
for voting.

So shall we just summarise all that? We started with
an 'old fashioned' electoral system that worked, but noting with some anxiety
that people seemed less and less inclined to vote,* we started to make it
less trouble for them to do so. We haven't been able to make it as easy
as 'press red button on remote' yet, but we'll get there. Unfortunately,
the hardships associated with old fashioned voting turn out (as the wonks
running policy would have known if they'd ever done any actual work in a
real-life election campaign) to have had a series of helpful safeguards
against abuse built in. In addition to now having a pressing need to deal
with the problems we've just created, we also need to figure out how to
verify cable TV voting, and text messages that go 'press reply to vote New
Labour'. The less trouble we make it to vote though, the more pressing the
issue of verification becomes, so we conclude that we can't leave this in
the hands of local authorities - we decide we have to handle it centrally,
and use data matching with multiple other national databases as part of
the verification process.

If we were actually thinking this through clearly (of
course we're not), it might occur to us that, if the National Identity Register
is intended to be the 'gold standard' of identification, then what we should
really be doing (and will end up doing anyway) is using other databases
(including the electoral registers) to maintain the accuracy of the gold
standard, rather than vice versa. That, in any event, is where following
the logic of the Government's approach to databases should take us - note,
before you write in, that this does not necessarily make it the sensible
approach. In the particular case of the electoral registers, decentralised
systems which to a reasonable extent did the simple job required of them
are to be replaced by a centralised system which initially will at best
have the same level of accuracy (because the NIR does not yet exist, and
will not be complete for many years), but which promises all sorts of benefits
as the spin off of data matching, and comes complete with the security disadvantages
('challenges', in Government-speak) of a centralised system. Might it not
be better to modernise the existing decentralised systems? But we presume
that's what the Government is going to insist, in the face of the evidence,
that it's doing anyway.

Naturally, the new centralised system will come with
the potential security hole that's becoming pretty much standard issue for
giant citizen databases. "Subject to appropriate security being in
place, the Information Commissioner's Office has been supportive of the
proposal for an individual to access the information held about them online
for the purpose of checking and either confirming accuracy or requesting
changes." Allowing them to do so live is also apparently under consideration,
but surely will not happen. It's also envisaged that "data users"
will be able to purchase registration data from CORE, and "we welcome
views on what proportion of the income from such sales should go back to
EROs who provided the information." That is, instead of local authorities
irritating you by selling the electoral register data to private companies,
central Government will be doing it instead, charging more because the national
data is so much more comprehensive. Remind us - who's supposed to be benefiting
from this wonderful new system? ®

* N.B., we never consider that more people might vote
if we made ourselves worth voting for; we find it far less scary to keep
lowering the barriers, and call the resultant increased participation 'commitment
to the democratic process.'

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